The Kindness That Destroyed the Alibi

The family story meant to save Jonas Noreika is the story that proves what his household knew. The bread, buns, and cottage-cheese pancakes carried to Jews in Šiauliai were not evidence of innocence. They were evidence that the degradation of Jewish life was visible to those inside my grandfather’s home. If they knew what was happening to the Jews, everyone knew.

Two Family Stories

For most of my life I was told two things about my grandfather, Jonas Noreika, and I believed both without noticing that they could not live in the same space.

The first was that he could not have known what would happen to the Jews he ordered into ghettos. The second was that my family fed those Jews because they were hungry, stripped, and poor. Set those two sentences beside each other. His innocence rests on the first. His guilt is hidden inside the second.

The family story came to me softened by love. My grandmother, Antanina Noreikienė, Močiutė to me, baked cookies and bread. She handed them to my mother, Dalia, and to other children in the family so they could carry food to the “poor Jews” who walked past the house. In one version, repeated by the apologist Viktoras Ašmenskas, my mother gave them buns. My cousin Dana, whom I interviewed in Šiauliai in 2013, remembered carrying pancakes filled with cottage cheese.

The story was meant to prove decency. That is how I received it. My family had seen suffering and responded with food. The Genocide Center and Noreika’s defenders like this story for the same reason. It lets them place a child with pancakes between my grandfather and the documents he signed. It lets them say: see, there was kindness.

Yes. There was kindness. That is why the story matters.

The Child at the Gate

A child is sent to the gate with food because the people going past are hungry. That is the premise of the kindness. The household could see what was being done to the Jews of Šiauliai. You do not feed a man who is fine. You do not send a child out with buns for people whose homes, money, food, and standing have not been taken. The charity has a date. It belongs to the same season in which Lithuanian administration was marking Jews, restricting their movement, forcing them from their homes, and taking their property.

Grant Gochin has just documented that office history in The Man Noreika Replaced. Ignas Urbaitis, my grandfather’s predecessor as Šiauliai County Chief, did not make Lithuania innocent. Urbaitis was himself inside the anti-Jewish administrative machinery. But he also shows that the office was not destiny. One man left or was removed after reaching some limit. My grandfather accepted the office after him. That is the part Lithuania cannot make disappear.

The Visible Suffering

By the time my grandfather took over, Šiauliai was not an innocent town waiting to learn what a ghetto meant. Jews had already been arrested, humiliated, robbed, marked, restricted, and murdered. The administrative vocabulary had already begun doing its work. My grandfather did not step into a neutral desk. He stepped into an office already being used against Jews, and then he used it.

Orders to Žagarė

On August 22, 1941, as Šiauliai County Chief, he transmitted the order moving Jews and half-Jews from the county’s towns into the Žagarė ghetto. The order required local officials to carry out the transfer and account for the property left behind. In September came the administration of Jewish movable property. These are not family rumors. They are the paperwork of destruction. The Jews my mother fed at the gate were poor because the state, through men like my grandfather, had made them poor.

The Paperwork of Destruction

This is where the family anecdote turns against the defense. The Genocide Center wants the feeding story to be treated as innocence, while the orders are treated as paperwork. It wants kindness to erase power. But the story only works because the victims’ condition was visible. My grandmother did not bake for an abstraction. My mother and cousins did not carry food to a legal category. They carried it to Jews whose degradation could be seen from the house.

The same evidentiary double standard runs through the state’s treatment of my grandfather. In How Lithuania Discredited Its Witness, Gochin shows how the Genocide Center rejected Aleksandras Pakalniškis, a free-world Lithuanian witness who placed Noreika inside the Plungė commandant environment, and rejected Leiba Lipsic, a survivor, while accepting family rescue anecdotes with no comparable scrutiny. That is not historical method. That is sorting. Evidence that implicates the hero must survive every attack. Evidence that softens him is believed on sight.

The State’s Double Standard

The pancakes belong inside that double standard. My cousin’s memory was real. I do not doubt her. I do not doubt my grandmother’s bread. I do not doubt that my mother, as a child, carried food. What I reject is the state’s use of that kindness as an alibi. The food does not prove that my grandfather protected Jews. It proves that his household knew Jews were being reduced to hunger and dependence in front of them.

The Genocide Center has argued, in effect, that my grandfather could not have understood what the ghetto was for. My family story makes that defense impossible. Maybe a child did not know the language of administration. Maybe my mother did not know the word “expropriation.” But adults in that house knew enough to bake. They knew enough to pity. They knew enough to see people passing by who had been made poor. And my grandfather knew more than all of them, because he was not watching the machinery from the window. He was signing for it from the desk.

After the murders, he signed directives concerning the belongings of his Jewish victims. That is another truth the defenders do not want placed beside the bread. You do not inventory, distribute, or liquidate the property of people you believe have merely moved away. You handle the furniture and clothing of people you know are gone, or soon will occupy the death pits.

The Meaning of the Pancakes

For years I tried to make the story tender because I needed it to be tender. My grandmother baked. My mother carried. My cousin remembered the cottage-cheese pancakes seventy years later with the clarity of a child who had seen something she could not name. I still believe the tenderness. I no longer accept the lie built on top of it.

Kindness is not innocence when it occurs inside a crime. It can be evidence of knowledge. It can show what everyone could see and what the official record later tried to make invisible. My family’s kindness does not pardon my grandfather. It convicts him of knowing the condition his orders helped create. The proof was on the plate.

What Lithuania Must Face

Lithuania will not move forward by preserving these stories as national anesthesia. It will not move forward by turning a child’s pancakes into a defense for an official who signed ghetto and property orders. It will not move forward by attacking witnesses, dividing the Holocaust into harmless fragments, or calling administrative participation something other than participation. Lithuania will only be able to move forward when the truth is told. Not the useful truth. Not the patriotic truth. The truth.

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,

Silvia Foti